Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Has the sexual revolution been good for women?

Mary Eberstadt has an insightful essay on three myths about the sexual revolution and its impact on women:

Myth No. 1: The "war on women" consists of tyrannical men arrayed against oppressed but pluckily united women.

In the first place, womankind, bless her fickle heart, is not exactly united on…anything.
Public opinion polls show women to be roughly evenly divided on the question of abortion. This same diversity of opinion was also manifest in the arguments over the proposed new federal mandate forcing employers to pay for birth control, including abortifacients.


Over 20,000 women, from all walks of life, signed an open letter to President Barack Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius objecting to the federal mandate. Co-written by lawyers Helen Alvare and Kim Daniels, that letter alone answered the taunting question of supporters of the measure, "Where are the women?" The answer: in impressive numbers on the opposite side of the dispute.

Other leaders hailing from the XX side of the chromosome gap also took public stands against the mandate, including politicians, pundits, professors, editors and authors who don't seem to have gotten the message that they are victims in all this. They considered the unexpected federal fiat a violation of religious liberty and individual conscience, but they didn't think these wrongs had anything to do with themselves qua women. Many men shared their view.

Many-- I dare say most-- outspoken feminists are leftists more than feminists. Note the virtual silence from the usual feminist quarters about the horrendous treatment conservative women like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Michelle Malkin have had to endure from leftie guttersnipes.

The fact is that there is a very large spectrum of views among women, and many women are very conservative.

Feminism is largely leftism, hiding behind skirts.

3 comments:

  1. I recently did a paper on Kinsey, the so called leader of the sexual revolution. I am currently 'sanitizing', editing, and rendering it anonymous for a blog post on the Faustian.
    I am not so sure the sexual revolution was a good thing for any one in the form it came. Particularly children, actually.
    But your points on women are spot on, Mike.

    Having been partially raised by my Grandparents and playing the role of care-giver (my adult son even more so) to them for years before they passed (Grandma was blind, and Granddad had multiple strokes after my father's death), I think they put it best: 'We have gone from the sublime to then ridiculous'. One extreme to the other. We went from the days when women did not even know what their period was until they got it (Grandma thought she was ill etc), to the promotion of promiscuity and the ever increasing destruction of the family as a unit.
    As you also note the politicization of the women's movement (among many other sexual 'lobbies') has created a kind of moral paradox. What was once a liberation movement has become a tool for control. They have been co-opted by cynical social engineers.

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  2. Michael,

    Actually, Mary Eberstadt's essay includes FOUR not THREE 'myths'.

    I suspect you didn't like one of the myths, the one about oral contraceptives and the Catholic Church, and decided to suppress it from your mind - not that it's church unfriendly though.

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    1. Nah. I planned to post on each of them, but I got distracted. Libs supply such fodder for commentary on venality and idiocy that it's hard to keep up.

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